How to Set Plot Background Color in Matplotlib?

Prerequisites: 

• Matplotlib
• Numpy

From the below figure one can infer that a plot consists of X-axis, Y-axis, plot title and the axes. By default, the color of the plot is white. If we have to set the background color of the plot so that our plot looks beautiful, we have to make the axes object, by using axes() attribute after plotting the graph.

Approach:

• Import module
• Load or create data
• Plot a regular graph
• Create axes object
• Set attribute set_facecolor() to the required color. This attribute accepts both name or color code of the color

Follow the given examples to understand better.

Example: Default color plot

Python

# importing library
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# giving values for x and y to plot
student_marks = [50, 60, 70, 80, 90]
student_grade = ['B', 'B', 'B+', 'B+', 'A']

plt.plot(student_marks, student_grade)

# Giving x label using xlabel() method
# with bold setting
plt.xlabel("student_marks", fontweight='bold')

# Giving y label using xlabel() method
# with bold setting
plt.ylabel("student_grade", fontweight='bold')

# Giving title to the plot
plt.title("Student Marks v/s Student Grade")

# Showing the plot using plt.show()
plt.show()

Output:

Example 2 : Setting background color to yellow

Python

# importing library
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# giving values for x and y to plot
student_marks = [50, 60, 70, 80, 90]
student_grade = ['B', 'B', 'B+', 'B+', 'A']
plt.plot(student_marks, student_grade)

# Giving x label using xlabel() method
# with bold setting
plt.xlabel("student_marks", fontweight='bold')
ax = plt.axes()

# Setting the background color of the plot
# using set_facecolor() method
ax.set_facecolor("yellow")

# Giving y label using xlabel() method
# with bold setting
plt.ylabel("student_grade", fontweight='bold')

# Giving title to the plot
plt.title("Student Marks v/s Student Grade")

# Showing the plot using plt.show()
plt.show()

Output:

Example 3: Setting background color to violet

Python

# importing libraries
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

# giving values for x and y to plot
x = np.arange(0, 10, .1)
y = np.sin(x)
plt.plot(x, y)

# Giving x label using xlabel() method
# with bold setting
plt.xlabel("X")
ax = plt.axes()

# Setting the background color of the
# plot using set_facecolor() method
ax.set_facecolor("violet")

# Giving y label using xlabel() method
# with bold setting
plt.ylabel('sin(x)')

# Showing the plot using plt.show()
plt.show()

Output:

Setting Outer and Inner color of plot

We can also set the color of the outer portion of the plot. To set both the color for plot background and for outer portion of the plot the only change we have to do in our code is that we have to add plt.figure(faceccolor=’color’) before plotting the graph.

Example 1:

Python

# importing libraries
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

# giving values for x and y to plot
x = np.arange(0, 10, .1)
y = np.sin(x)

# Set background color of the outer
# area of the plt
plt.figure(facecolor='yellow')

# Plotting the graph between x and y
plt.plot(x, y)

# Giving x label using xlabel() method
# with bold setting
plt.xlabel("X")
ax = plt.axes()

# Setting the background color of the plot
# using set_facecolor() method
ax.set_facecolor("violet")

# Giving y label using xlabel() method with
# bold setting
plt.ylabel('sin(x)')

# Showing the plot using plt.show()
plt.show()

Output:

Example 2: Setting plot color using html color codes

Python

# importing libraries
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

# giving values for x and y to plot
x = np.arange(0, 10, .1)
y = np.sin(x)

# Set background color of the outer
# area of the plt
plt.figure(facecolor='#94F008')

# Plotting the graph between x and y
plt.plot(x, y)

# Giving x label using xlabel() method
# with bold setting
plt.xlabel("X")
ax = plt.axes()

# Setting the background color of the plot
# using set_facecolor() method
ax.set_facecolor("#1CC4AF")

# Giving y label using xlabel() method with
# bold setting
plt.ylabel('sin(x)')

# Showing the plot using plt.show()
plt.show()

Output:

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we’ve gone over several ways to change a background of a plot using Python and Matplotlib.